


Undoing Tangles

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 09:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19196221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I love protective!Guardians, and I also love when they desperately try to keep Jack away from Pitch. You know how with the youngest child of a family, sometimes there’s an automatic reaction to treat that person as a child for a long while after they’ve grown up?Please could I have some of that with Jack and the Guardians? First they take Jack in (or one of them does), and they’re all reasonably respectful of Jack’s freedom, until they start hearing strange stories. Stories of how Jack has been seen frolicking with Pitch, and how Pitch has been seen giving Jack flowers/gifts and looking all happy, etc…Suddenly all the Guardians are insisting Jack get back home before a certain time each day (hiding it well at first - North saying he’s making a fruitcake, it’s Sandman’s birthday etc…)...[cut for length]"You can’t ask me to play something like this straight, I’ll sink into the Earth and never be seen again.Rumors have still been heard. Pitch has been seen giving Jack gifts. But did anyone ask Jack what was going on? Sadly, no. So Jack has to ask the Guardians why they’ve been so weird. Turns out Pitch’s idea of what’s going on is very different from Jack’s.





	Undoing Tangles

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 2/24/2016.

“Okay, no,” Jack said, looking around at the other Guardians. “This has gone on long enough. You’ve all been acting really weird, and I just—I don’t have a clue anymore.  _Why_  are you trying to get me to stay here at the Pole all the time? I thought it might have something to do with rebuilding the icecaps, but all of you seem to want me to actually stay inside the Workshop. North, you especially—you’ve been giving me all this  _stuff_ , but it’s not stuff I want anymore, and you’ve got to know that, so why…just…why? I don’t need a fur-lined cloak that doesn’t match my clothes!” He shook his current present in the air. “I need to go and do my Guardian thing! I can’t be the Guardian of Fun if I’m cooped up somewhere, and you all know that! Is there some problem with what I’ve been doing? I’d like to know that rather than face this weird attempt at being spoiled. Is there a threat? I’d like to know about that, too, because I cannot, I repeat, cannot, stay here so often.”  
  
“Right,” Bunny said, with a glance at North, Tooth, and Sandy. “I think there’s a threat, but the idea was that we shouldn’t tell you we thought it was a threat, because that would drive you away.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Yeah, since you’re pretty obviously genuinely confused I’m going to wager that we four have been making assumptions and also asses of ourselves.”  
  
“But the ribbons!” Tooth exclaimed, pointing to said ornaments, in blue and silver, tied artistically around Jack’s staff.  
  
“Well, I’m not saying that everything you’ve given me was bad!” Jack said. “And these were from before you all started acting so strange, when you would leave things where I would find them on my own, and not insist that I come to the Workshop every five minutes.”  
  
“You thought those were from us?” North asked, an odd expression on his face.  
  
Jack frowned. “Who else would they be from? I found them in a place that was pretty inaccessible, so it’s not likely that a kid could have left them there. That leaves you, right? I haven’t talked to anyone else other than you and my believers, so no one else would know where I usually go to rest.”  
  
“You’ve really talked to no one else?” Tooth asked.  
  
“No! Why? Who are the ribbons from?”  
  
Sandy formed the image of Pitch’s profile above his head. “No…no way,” Jack said. He turned to the ribbons, narrowing his eyes at them. “Isn’t it more likely that these ribbons blew to that mountaintop? I mean…”  
  
“It wasn’t just the ribbons,” Bunny said. “It was a fair number of the smaller gifts. We didn’t know what you did with the others, but it was obvious that you’d accepted these. I wanted to confront you right away to have a talk about how dangerous Pitch was and how this was probably nothing but manipulation, but I was outvoted. Apparently, that would have been too much like acting like a parent telling their kid who they could and couldn’t date. Thus driving you towards someone who was no doubt telling you only things you wanted to hear.”  
  
Jack stared at the others with shock and alarm. “The dating thing is just a metaphor, right? These weren’t meant to be…” He scrunched up his face. “Romantic gifts?”  
  
Bunny sighed. “Not to judge by the besotted look on Pitch’s face that the tooth fairies spotted when they caught him leaving a few of the gifts. They’ve also seen him following, kind of dancing, they said, on the ground below you while you flew overhead, also sort of dancing.”  
  
Jack backed up to lean against the railing. “Do they mean all my loops and zig-zags and—I don’t know, I don’t have names for them—but that’s how I always fly.” He paused. “It’s fun,” he said quietly. He held his staff to one side. “Can someone untie these ribbons for me?”  
  
Sandy stepped up to do so.  
  
“Even you thought Pitch was successfully wooing me?” Jack asked him. “After what he did to you? After what I saw him do to you with my own eyes?”  
  
Sandy shrugged. He had gotten better.  
  
Jack looked to the others. “Why?”  
  
Tooth and North glanced at each other. “When you told us about Antarctica, it really seemed like you had a lot of sympathy for Pitch,” Tooth said. “You talked about his honesty…”  
  
Jack rested his head in his hand. “He was honest. For like thirty seconds. While he was still a murderer. And then immediately afterward he threw Baby Tooth into a cliff and broke my staff in half.”  
  
“What about not being seen?” North asked. “Is common between you. Only Bunny experienced a fraction of what you and Pitch know of that.”  
  
Jack looked up again and frowned. “Do I really seem like the kind of person who would give romantic attention to someone regardless of the horrible things they did to my friends, because of a horrible experience we shared? I…what I went through before I became a Guardian…I don’t want that to be the most important thing about me. I want things from this new part of my life to become the most important things about me.”  
  
Sandy pressed the staff back into Jack’s hand, now free of ribbons. “Thanks,” Jack said. “Is this really about my reluctance to become a Guardian when you first snatched me up? I was pretty clear what my issues were, I thought. It didn’t have anything to do with Pitch.” He sighed. “Anyway. The way Bunny’s explained it, it seems like while you were trying to avoid treating me like a rebellious teenager, you ended up treating me like a child, and not in a good way.”  
  
“We wanted to try to show that we cared about you and wanted you to stay with us,” Tooth said quietly.  
  
“To offer you more than whatever Pitch could,” North added.  
  
“And I’m going to say that we did it wrong,” Bunny said. “I was awful to Jack right before he went to Antarctica with his teeth. He thought we weren’t offering him anything at all, then. Not Guardianship, not friendship, not anything. Pitch did offer him something then, and Jack rejected him. More to the point, Jack didn’t know Pitch before the dark ages.”  
  
“Why does that matter?” Jack asked.  
  
“Remind us to tell you after you spend some time away from the Workshop,” Bunny said. “You want that right away, don’t you?”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Jack said. “But first, there’s something else I actually want. More than all the random presents, and more even than all the time we’ve been spending together—which hardly counts, you know, because we were all buried in a bunch of assumptions lately.” He stood up and walked toward the Guardians, looking at each of them in turn. “I want you to understand that I’m not a teenager, even if I look like one, and I’m not a fool, either. No comments about whether I look like one right now, please. I’m a Guardian, and I know what kind of threat Pitch poses. I want you to believe that you can tell me about things that affect all of us, and that I’m not at a stage in my existence where I would do things just to contradict you for no reason. Even if, by some bizarre set of circumstances, I was attracted to Pitch, I would want to know your concerns. I mean…none of you really think you’re my parents, right? That would be, um…well, anything else aside, I’m three hundred years old. Younger than all of you, but definitely not a child. And, well, awkward, but none of you think you’re responsible for making sure I have appropriate romantic partners, right? I mean in terms of me being “innocent” or some other uncomfortable term.  
  
Anyway, I just really want you to understand that just because I’m the Guardian of Fun doesn’t mean I can’t think.”  
  
“Take it you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t appreciate a shovel talk on your behalf, then,” Bunny said. “I’ve got it.”  
  
“We will try to do better, Jack,” said North.  
  
Tooth nodded. “Sorry about this.”  
  
Sandy squeezed his hand and gave him a rueful smile.  
  
“Now, you couldn’t be more right about shovel talks,” Jack said, “but, um…I would appreciate it a lot if someone—but not me—could go ask Pitch what he thinks he’s doing, and what he thinks is going on. I don’t want to be a coward, but this…”  
  
“Might very well be a threat. Like I said from the start,” Bunny said. “Don’t worry about it Frostbite. We’ll cover you.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Note about the dark ages: based vaguely on Rufftoon’s comics, this was when Pitch stopped being reasonable and ambiguous and possibly a candidate for Guardianship. The others remember that Pitch, and forget that Jack has only ever known him as a murderous, megalomaniacal asshole.


End file.
